Last week, as a result of a friend looking up my ancestry, I discovered some weird stuff in the family tree. First of all, the name “Coyne” extends back to Ireland at least as far as the early eighteenth century, back to one John W. Coyne of Galway. And it could go even farther back than that. For years I’ve been telling people that the name “Coyne” must have been changed from “Cohen” or “Cohan” in recent times to masquerade someone’s Jewishness.  Further, it’s possible that the lineage of Coynes extending down to John’s grandson Peter Coyne, wasn’t Jewish at all. My cousin Jeff reported that the marriage of Peter to Pauline Zoffer in Brooklyn in 1874, though printed as a “Jewish wedding” in the papers, was actually a mixed marriage of a Jewish woman to a non-Jewish man, which caused great consternation in the Zoffer family.

What makes this weirder is that when I got my Y chromosome tested about ten years ago to see if I was a member of the Jewish kohanim tribe, I found out that although I wasn’t a member of this elite subgroup, my Y was definitely of Eastern European Jewish origin. Since my Y must have belonged to John W. Coyne and all his Coyne-ian ancestors, including my father (the Y is transmitted as if it’s attached to the father’s last name), it’s not clear why, if Coynes from John to Peter were gentiles, my Y was Jewish. (My dad was Jewish according to Jewish law, since his mother was Jewish.) I may get a fuller DNA test in the future.

Further, I found out that my uncle Emil—my father’s sister’s husband—was not Jewish, so that was a mixed marriage, too, even though a rabbi performed the ceremony. There’s clearly been some substantial outbreeding in my family tree.

The latest tidbit, which I mentioned a few days ago, was that my father’s dad sued what looked to be one of his relatives. This is from the Pittsburgh Press on August 1, 1928:

I asked my friend, who turns out to be a crack sleuth, to find out what happened with this lawsuit. And this is what was unearthed.

First, the Cinncinnati Enquirer from August 3, 1928, reports that the extradition request was successful:

And this, from the Uniontown, Pennsylvania Morning Herald exactly a week later:

The upshot: my paternal grandfather sued his own cousin, and the cousin died, surely from the stress! My grandpa killed his relative!

All I can say is “Oy gewalt!”

I continue to get clippings about my family (just skip this if you’re bored!). Here’s the family returning from our 2.5 years in Greece, as reported in the Evening Standard (Uniontown, Pennsylvania) on July 15, 1957. I was seven then, and if you can make out the words below, I was reported to speak fluent Greek (something that I’ve been told several times, and which I believe, for I pick it up quickly when I visit Greece).  The statements of my folks about Greece show that they enjoyed it, but were glad to get back the “old hometown”. My father was fond of such bromides.*

We had a sizeable mansion in Greece, living in the small town of Kiffisia—a suburb of Athens. (I still remember the address, 23 Pentelis Street, but when I went back some years ago the house was gone.) An Army captain could afford such luxury because everything was cheap. We had several acres of gardens, tended by two gardeners named Yiorgos and Bobby, and a maid named Despina. There were also lots of stray cats that my mother fed.

As my dad noted, he missed fresh fruit, and I remember that an orange was a hard-to-find treat, even though it was Greece. Remember, this was ten years after the end of WWII, and the country was still suffering the aftereffects of the war and occupation.  I remember having to go down to the basement every morning to fetch two big cans of milk, as we weren’t supposed to buy fresh milk.  Some of the canned stuff went to the cats.

I was able to make out the text below, but it took time. Note that I had a big grin, for these were the days before I became lugubrious.

Tomorrow: How my grandfather killed his cousin.

*Every night my father would tuck me in, and often dispensed a witticism or bromide at bedtime. I remember several; here’s one: “Jerry, I’ve only been wrong once in my life, and that was when I thought I was wrong but I wasn’t.”

From the Uniontown (Pennsylvania) Morning Herald, January 4, 1950, heralding my birth on December 30 of the previous year. Note that I was born in a Catholic hospital—they don’t even show my name!

As I wrote yesterday, I continue to find out more about my relatives on my father’s side, and whether I have any gentile genes from Ireland remains a mystery. So does the source of the name “Coyne”, which apparently goes back in that form to the early 19th century—in Ireland.

But I now have several relevant newspaper articles found by a friend who subscribes to Newspapers.com, where apparently you can find nearly any clipping. From these I discovered that my father, his father, and his father’s mother were in a car crash on the Pittsburgh-Monongahela road on August 6, 1929; my dad was 11 and sustained “head injuries”, but nobody was seriously hurt.

Here are two items of interest—to me (I promise I won’t bore you with many of these). In this one, my paternal grandfather, Joseph C. Coyne of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, seems to have sued one of his relatives (Zoffer was his mother’s maiden name) for pecuniary reasons. This clipping, from the Pittsburgh Press on August 1, 1928, will surely raise the Jewish stereotypes:

And the wedding of Aunt Mannie, my father’s sister. I remember her well. Uncle Emil, her husband, died fairly young of a heart attack, and she spent her final years in Florida—the end of the line for all Jewish people. Before that she was the secretary of the famous and racist anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Note that my dad and my future mom (Lillian Frank, not yet married to my dad) were in attendance at the wedding, and my aunt is described as “attractive daughter of Joseph Coyne”! Also, it was a Jewish wedding—I’m not sure if Uncle Emil was Jewish—and the bride didn’t wear white.  This was published in the Morning Herald of Uniontown, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1939. Both bride and groom apparently worked at Joseph Coyne’s auto parts store.

I think our family has a penchant for outbreeding. My great-grandfather Peter Coyne (who married a Jewish woman) might himself have been a goy, my uncle Bernie took a shicksa for his second wife, much to my grandmother Sadie’s chagrin, and I’ve dated only two Jewish girls my entire life. Grandmother Sadie Frank was a piece of work: when I was in high school in Virginia, and she was visiting, she once gave me $5 to take a girl to the movies. When she found out the girl wasn’t Jewish, she took the money back. I am not making this up.

Oh, here’s my grandfather’s radio store (I didn’t know he had one along with the tire store and other stores); this was in the Evening Standard of Uniontown Pennsylvania on May 2, 1929, just a few months before the stock market crash that bankrupted Joseph Coyne: